Between Translation & Composition
Geeta Patel Miraji was a consummate poet of the streets, someone whose life was made replete through the journeys he took. Mehr Farooqi’s many eloquent portrait in the newspaper Dawn brings him to life as a sadhu, mala in hand, long hair untamed, earrings dangling. One can almost imagine him, his thaila or shoulder bag laden with books and loose pages scribbled full of poems, a small bottle of alcohol tucked between them, wending his way on a yatra. He could have been a typical aashiq, a lover, hollow-eyed, locks askew, bechain, swinging between hope and despair, haunting the street, awaiting a glimpse of the woman he said he loved, Mira Sen, outside her firmly closed door, loitering outside Kinnaird College in Lahore. As he describes in his nazm, “Aankh Micholii”: “I walk past my house a little, wish she were here. How quickly she eludes my glance. What must I believe? Does she abhor me? But this: she looked down so soon, in such silence. What can I believe, does she know my longing? And this? When our eyes meet, she shuts her door, and I, destitute, wander again.” But Miraji was a poet of the streets in many less conventional ways. If one can imagine galiyan as poetic paths, he also haunted the byways of libraries. He had forsaken a conventional education and was entirely self-taught. The librarian at the Punjab Public library remembered him as the first one in and the last one out. Libraries became his avenues to other worlds, avenues he travelled inexorably, returning to Urdu from sojourns into translations from French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and, closer to home, from Bengali, Sanskrit, and Braj. In absolutely essential ways these journeys transformed his being, became the lodestone for his poetry. Miraji was very young when he wrote many of his essays on poetry that he could have encountered only through such “travels”; some of them, collected in Mashriq-o-Maghrib ke Naghmain, were composed when he was 18 years old. So from the inception of his first forays into writing the lovely nazms, geets and ghazals for which he became famous, he translated. And these translations were seminal for him as a poet. A few poets have acknowledged how important translation is for their own composition. Perhaps Rilke in his ninth elegy alluded to the centrality of translation. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, moved by the Sanskrit play Shakuntala and the profound lines of Hafez, sought out translation as inspiration for cycles of lyric. Kenneth Rexroth, in his essay “The Poet as Translator,” characterised translation as a kind of going beyond oneself in the act of voicing someone else’s lyric: “The translation of poetry into poetry is an act of sympathy — the identification of another person with oneself, the transference of his utterance to one’s own utterance … to transmit it back into one’s own idiom with maximum viability.” But Rexroth ventures further than this when, in discussing the British poet HD’s translations from ancient Greek, he calls her process and her verse “the story of her own possession by the ghost of Meleager”. For Rexroth the skimpiest understanding of translation is the common one: translation as a process of turning a text from one language into a text in another. Here the translator is almost absent, treated as a transparent funnel or conduit who enables what is most important — the new text. And usually what people look for when they think of translation in this way is fidelity, how close the translation is to the original. Rexroth brings the translator back into view, not just as someone who has to feel their way into the original by overcoming a self, but as someone who, in the process of translation, is taken over by the words that they are translating. They become something or someone else, and the two languages in their hands absorb these transformations. To explain the place of translation in Miraji’s life and work I would go even further. Adrienne Rich, in the United States, comes the closest to exemplifying what I want to say. Her poetic voice changed after she worked on Ghalib and she found in ghazal a form of lyric that made it more possible for her to enunciate love as loss. Miraji sought after different kinds of speaking when he translated; these then became his voice. But he also became another person through translation. And I am not sure how many poets have, like Miraji, held onto the spaces between translation and composition, composition and reading, reading and translation, as though they were as necessary as breath. Urdu has of course had its own a long history of translation. One familiar and perhaps apocryphal story of the origins of the language makes translation between the various communities of the camp or the market its birthing site. And among many of the notables in the history of Urdu literature whose names may be invoked in relation to translation was Altaf Husain Hali. Hali, who made some of his living from translating books from English, could be thought of as someone whose call for a new aesthetics — through islaah or the improvement or revision of Urdu poetry to produce Urdu’s “nayii shairii” as poetry based in natural (that is, realist) description — was founded in translation. Nineteenth-century British realism transmuted into Urdu poetry might also have had the project of translation as its host. “Nagarii nagarii phiraa musaafir ghar kaa raastaa bhuul gayaa, kyaa hai meraa kyaa hai teraa apnaa paraayaa bhuul gayaa.” This matlaa, the opening verse in a ghazal Miraji includes in Teen Rang (Three Colours), one of the poetry collections he compiled, scripted painstakingly in his own hand, fleshes out translation in myriad ways. It might be said to embody many of the features Miraji brings to translation. “From town to town the traveller journeyed, and forgot the road home, what was mine, what a stranger’s, both lost to memory,’’ he writes. “I don’t remember why
Glitch
Avishek Parui — When a 45-year old man with a beautiful wife and two teenaged kids still needs to watch gruesome violent videos all by himself every damn night to sleep well, you know there’s a glitch growing somewhere! Two cigarette smoke-curls were blending lazily over the bench where the men sat. The traffic across the street was getting busier with the falling hours. The car-horns were getting shriller, scooping spaces that were thinning fast. The December dusk of Kolkata waited for the streetlights to glow. The Friday evening was beginning to spread with the hopes of happier weekends. It was the time between two light-zones at Park Street Crossing where waves ran into what did not move. — Glitch! You sound as if I’m some camera shutter conked out. It’s not a snag you see, it’s a pattern, and one I stick to as it’s become a ritual over the months. Just like brushing your teeth after a meal. It’s not that I’m not embarrassed about it as I don’t really enjoy it. No more than you enjoy brushing your teeth every night! Both men were 45, both balding at the obvious places in their heads, both weary with the weight of the over-wrought; colleagues at the sales section of Panacea, a massive medicine company that manufactured painkillers that claimed to kill pain in less than 10 minutes. All kinds of pain. Panacea: the giant killer of pain. It sought to spread its branches across Kolkata, a city where the high-rises had to be rudely removed from the sounds that sank. — Pattern or ritual, the fact stands that you cannot sleep till you watch people torturing each other every night. You lock yourself in the bedroom on Sunday afternoons watching throats being slit when the rest of your family watches sitcom in TV. You’re 45. It’s sick and almost funny! — It certainly is! And that’s the real part you know. I mean we’ll both be really sick going by the way we’re headed now. Ten hours’ work a day, golden fried prawns at dinner parties where our wives wear dresses we can’t afford. Logically we ought to get our first stroke in three years and be dead in a decade. When I watch gory violence it’s not because I want to get a horny high or because I’m depressed . . . you know . . . It’s about something else. It’s about the ritual of seeing rituals break. It’s about seeing strangers scream in meaningless violence. It’s my own private hell. It’s someway real . . . you see . . . A real hell. And I need it to manage meanings in all the fake heavens around me. The voice paused after having hurled the words out in one breath. Too many cigarettes had lessened him already. All things around were lessening together in different degrees of decadence. The brief silence between the two men was slapped by the swishes and shouts as the evening began to eat the big buildings. The Friday dusk at Park Street carried a colour thickened by the smell of fries from various fast food joints that sell fast. The big restaurants with dark windows began to get dolled up for the Friday footfalls. At the appointed hour the billboards glowed up, as did the street lamps and neon signs. A small man with big balloons walked before the big music store that played John Lennon’s Imagine inside the cold glasses. One of the two men in the bench stared at the balloons. Different colors tied together in strings that looked the same: blue, yellow, red, green. The balloons floated gently, with the waves of air and sound around. Everything was mixing painlessly. Along the slanting lights. Through the camera lens. — That’s phony and lame . . . I mean it’s normal for a man of your condition to be bored, to go for drinks and see several women, we know many who bang around other people’s wives and still more who weekend with whores. That’s normal enough you see. But being compulsively dependent on violence for sleep is downright pathetic! You may as well watch porn! Get yourself a woman if you’re bored with your family. I can help you with that! The small balloon man still stood before the music store. He looked smaller with the growing crowd of people who crossed him like waves of car horns. He wasn’t selling anything. The blue, red and yellow balloons kept floating gently, swirling to the sound waves around. Not very far away a group of teenaged kids was heading for a pub, pushing against the crowd of people headed the other way, towards the Park Street metro station. Their words flicked the sweaty shirts of the tired workers hurrying for home. — When my dad tried to act tough on me last night, I smiled at him knowingly. I mean it’s so damn obvious he’s sleeping out with someone, that filthy bastard. Guess mom knows it too but she doesn’t care. And why should she? She’s got her own life to live and enjoy. This morning as I was leaving dad called me and handed me a couple of grand in a tender voice. No lecturing, no big speeches. Nothing. A neat two grand. Guess he’s paying me to shut up. Not to make an emotional fuss about it. As if I cared! — It’s good to have guilty parents. We all know that! My mom’s a whore. She’s been cheating on dad for over three years now. She starts seeing her friends whenever dad’s away on office tours. Where’s the goddam lighter gone? — What do you care? All you need is their signs across your application to a US university after the bloody GRE scores appear! And don’t worry they’ll be guilty enough to keep sending you money while you’re boozing away in the States! The evening lights were spreading out fast, with the breaths